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Nanoscale MOSFET Modeling for the Design of Low-power Analog and RF Circuits

Nanoscale MOSFET Modeling for the Design of Low-power Analog and RF Circuits

Thursday, February 15, 2018 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

Venue:

Y2E2 Room 111

Speaker:

Prof. Christian Enz - EPFL

Abstract / Description:

**Due to technical difficulties, the beginning of the talk was not recorded and the slides were not recorded with the audio. The slides are available as pdf for download.**

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) poses stringent requirements on the energy consumption and has hence become the primary driver for low-power analog and RF circuit design. Implementation of increasingly complex functions under highly constrained power and area budgets, while circumventing the challenges posed by modern device technologies, makes analog and RF circuit design ever more challenging. Some guidance would therefore be invaluable for the designer to navigate the multi-variable design space.

This talk presents low-power analog and RF design techniques that can be applied from device to circuit level. It starts with the presentation of the concept of inversion coefficient IC as an essential design parameter that spans the entire range of operating points from weak via moderate to strong inversion. Several figures-of-merit (FoM) including the Gm/ID, the Ft and their product Gm‧ Ft/ID, capturing the various trade-offs encountered in analog and RF circuit design are presented. The simplicity of the IC-based models is emphasized and compared against measurements of 40- and 28-nm bulk CMOS processes and BSIM6 simulations. Finally, a simple technique to extract the basic model parameters from measurements or simulation is described before concluding.

Bio:

Christian Enz, PhD, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), 1989. He is currently Professor at EPFL and Director of the Institute of Microengineering and head of the IC Lab. Until April 2013 he was VP at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland where he was heading the Integrated and Wireless Systems Division. Prior to joining CSEM, he was Principal Senior Engineer at Conexant (formerly Rockwell Semiconductor Systems), Newport Beach, CA, where he was responsible for the modeling and characterization of MOS transistors for RF applications. His technical interests and expertise are in the field of ultralow-power analog and RF IC design, wireless sensor networks and semiconductor device modeling. Together with E. Vittoz and F. Krummenacher he is the developer of the EKV MOS transistor model and the author of the book "Charge-Based MOS Transistor Modeling - The EKV Model for Low-Power and RF IC Design" (Wiley, 2006). He is the author and co-author of more than 250 scientific papers and has contributed to numerous conference presentations and advanced engineering courses.